iOS 5 tips and tricks

This is a discussion on iOS 5 tips and tricks within the iOS Apps forums, part of the iPod, iPhone, iPad Forum category; One of the more interesting ways to share your photos from the iPad is with the Journal option. This is like a digital scrapbook that ...

One of the more interesting ways to share your photos from the iPad is with the Journal option. This is like a digital scrapbook that you can hand as a slideshow to a friend on your iPad, send to iTunes, or share out as a web page via iCloud. To create a new Journal, select the photos you want to put into the journal with a tap/hold to select multiple photos. Then tap on the Share icon in the upper right. Tap on Journal, and iPhoto will give you the option to use the ones you’ve chosen, choose more, and then, once you tap through, the chance to name your Journal and chose a theme. The themes are basically the material that shown behind the photos in the Journal, like Cotton or Denim. You can add these to an already created Journal at this time as well by tapping on the Journal/New field. Once you tap Create Journal, then Show, you’ll have the chance to move the photos around, tapping on each one to resize, and adding captions. It’s all very slick. When finished, tap the Share button in the upper right and you can export it as an iCloud web page, a Slideshow, or an iTunes movie.

When publishing a journal to iCloud is the size of the journal count against your iCloud storage allotment ???

Stop YouTube Links Opening the YouTube App in iOS

With how prevalent HTML5 is these days it seems unnecessary for the YouTube app to launch every time you tap a YouTube video link on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. If you’d rather watch the movie directly in Safari, here is how to stop the YouTube app from launching:

Open “Settings” and tap on “General”

Tap “Restrictions” – enable them if they aren’t enabled yet, setting a passcode in the process

Flip “YouTube” to OFF and close out of settings

Now you are free to click YouTube links from Mail, Safari, or where ever else, and the YouTube app won’t open. A side effect to this tip is that it also hides the YouTube icon from the home screen, which may or may not be desirable.

Send Current Webpage to Chrome from Safari in iOS with a Bookmarklet

The recently released Chrome browser for iOS is pretty good, and even if it’s not replacing Safari as your primary web browser on an iPhone or iPad quite yet, you may still find this bookmarklet handy which lets you instantly send the currently active web page from Safari into Chrome:

From the iOS device, launch Safari and copy the following line javascript code:

javascript:location.href="googlechrome"+location.h ref.substring(4);

Bookmark this webpage (or any other) by tapping the Arrow and selecting “Add Bookmark”

Open Safari Bookmarks and tap “Edit” and then tap to edit the newly created bookmark

Rename it to “Send to Chrome” and hit the ‘x’ alongside the URL, then tap and hold to paste in the javascript code copied above

Test it out by opening the bookmarks bar and selecting “Send to Chrome”

Safari switches and Google Chrome launches with a new browser tab containing the URL you activated the bookmarklet from. If you have any issues with this not working, check how the quotations are handled when editing the bookmarklet in iOS Safari. You may need to replace each ” with %22 instead, which would look like this:

Another variation is to use this javascript snippet, which apparently works better with https URLs:

javascript:location=location.href.replace(/^https?/, 'googlechrome');

Both variations worked fine in our testing, so go with what works for you. This is a great tweak for web developers and designers who need to perform browser compatibility tests on as many different browsers as possible.

Find What App is Using Location Services & Draining Battery Life in iOS

You can tell if Location Services is being used on an iPhone or iPad because a little purple arrow icon appears in the upper right corner of the menubar in iOS. If you’ve never paid attention to this before, it matters because when Location Services are being used it can drain your battery much faster than usual, this is because the app determining your location is constantly using network activity and GPS to pinpoint your coordinates and, usually, report it back to the apps servers. If you see that purple location services arrow pop up and you have no idea what app u

Here is how to quickly determine which app is using Location Services, and potentially draining your iOS devices battery life:

Open “Settings” and tap on “Location Services”

Scroll through the app list until you see the app name with the purple arrow alongside it, it will be located next to the ON switch

Flip this app to OFF if you want to disable location services for that app

If it’s on constantly, turning off an apps location use can result in significant battery savings, but it can also lead to inaccurate app information and some apps will stop working completely. For example, the Maps application will not be able to route directions from your current location.

Transfer a Playlist from iPhone, iPod, or iPad to iTunes

Do you have a music playlist on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you want to move to iTunes on your computer? It’s fairly easy:

Connect the iPod, iPhone to the computer and launch iTunes

Under the “Devices” menu locate the playlist you want to copy to the computer and right-click on the playlist name, then select “Export”

Name the playlist and select “XML” as the filetype format and save the file to somewhere easy to find, like the desktop

Pull down the “File” menu, go to “Library” and now select “Import Playlist”, choosing the XML playlist file you exported in the previous step

The playlist from the iOS device is now in iTunes on the computer, find it under the Playlists menu. You will obviously need to have the music featured in the playlist within iTunes in order for the playlist to work, if you don’t have the music because you switched computers you will need to transfer the music from the iOS device to the computer first.

This is a great solution if you’ve lost playlists from iTunes and the standard recovery process didn’t work, or if you’ve just spent a lot of time customizing playlists directly on an iOS device and you now want to enjoy them on the computer.

Deal with a Broken iPhone Home Button by Enabling Assistive Touch

You can sometimes fix an unresponsive Home button by force quitting apps, but that doesn’t always work. If your iOS devices home button is completely broken then you can use an accessibility feature called Assistive Touch to enable a virtual home button instead, this lets you use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod even if the button is physically incapable of being pressed due to damage or whatever else. Here is how to turn this feature on:

Open “Settings” and go to “General”, then tap on “Accessibility”

Under “Physical & Motor” tap on “Assistive Touch” and then flip the switch to ON

Look for the new assistive touch button to appear in the lower right corner, tap that to access the virtual home button

This is the only way to continue using an iOS device with a broken home button without repairing the home button itself.

If you’re stuck in an app you can’t get to the home screen because the button is broken, just turn the device off and on again and you’ll boot directly to the home screen where you can then launch Settings.

Stop the Period Automatically Typing in iOS

Double tapping the spacebar in iOS inserts a period at the end of a sentence and starts another, a feature that can really improve typing on the virtual keyboards of iOS, but not everyone likes the behavior. If you don’t want the iPhone or iPad to automatically type periods at the end of a word, here’s all you have to do:

Open Settings and tap “General”

Tap “Keyboard” and look for ‘”.” Shortcut’ and flip that to OFF

A period will no longer be inserted if you double-tap the spacebar, leaving you to manually insert all punctuation when typing in iOS.

Embedded YouTube videos not working on your iPhone? Try this fix

Don’t you just hate it when you see this dreaded image in the place where a YouTube video is supposed to be embedded? If you consistently have this issue, then there is a fair chance you have your YouTube app hidden via a jailbreak tweak, or you have restrictions enabled. Restrictions can be enabled without a jailbreak.

As it turns out, having the YouTube app hidden can result in embedded videos being replaced with the image above. YouTube videos on the actual YouTube site will still play fine regardless, but embedded videos can give you problems if your stock YouTube app is hidden, or you have restrictions enabled.

Check inside for a video walkthrough on how to apply the easy fixes.

Jailbreak apps like Springtomize 2, and SBSettings, courtesy of Poof, are the sort of apps with the capabilities to hide an app icon from view.

Step 1: Check to see if you can find your stock YouTube app on your Home screen.

Step 2: If you can’t find your stock YouTube app, open the jailbreak app that you used to hide the stock YouTube app, and unhide it.

Step 3: Refresh your browser and visit a site with an embedded YouTube video — iDownloadBlog has lots of them — and verify that you can now play embedded YouTube videos.

Ironically, if you’re having this issue, you won’t be able to watch it on this page. Instead, head over to our YouTube channel where you can watch it instead.

Hide SMS & iMessage Previews from the Lock Screen on iPhone

The lock screen of an iPhone (or iPad) defaults to showing a preview of all received Messages and SMS, showing both the senders name and the content of their text message. That can be very convenient, but it also has the potential for oversharing private information, here’s how to disable the text preview from showing on the lock screen:

Open “Settings” and tap on “Notifications”

Select “Messages” and slide “Show Preview” to OFF

Now if you receive a text message, MMS, or iMessage, only the recipients name will appear on the home screen, and the content of the message will be hidden. To see the full text contents now you can either slide the icon or go directly to the Messages app.

If you want to completely disable SMS from appearing on the lock screen, flip the “View in Lock Screen” setting to “OFF”.

Make iPhone Photos Look Better By Using Auto-Enhance

The iPhone takes pretty good pictures as is, but you can make your photos look even better by using the built-in Auto-Enhance tool. It’s not an overwhelming effect by any means, it’s more of a subtle boost to contrast and saturation, which generally makes the picture look closer to how it would be seen in real life.

From the Photos app, tap on the picture you want to modify

Tap the “Edit” button in the corner and then tap the little magic wand icon from the toolbar to enable Auto-Enhance for that picture

The “Auto-Enhance On” message appears at the bottom of the image showing you what the picture looks like with the feature enabled, tap “Save” to confirm the changes to the image

With some photos you will barely notice a difference because auto-enhance can be very subtle, but with others it gives pictures a nice pop in color and contrast. With some images the changes are almost impossible to notice, so don’t think you will get Instagram-like adjustments out of this.

While in the Edit menu you can also rotate images, crop pictures, and even remove red-eye.

There’s no way to turn this on automatically for every picture so you will have to use it selectively. Technically the feature works on an iPad and iPod touch too, but for most of us the iPhone is what we snap pictures with on a regular basis.